Travels inspire native of Ohio

Susan Feniger was attending Ottawa Hills High School in suburban Toledo when a trip to the Netherlands changed everything.

Susan Feniger was attending Ottawa Hills High School in suburban Toledo when a trip to the Netherlands changed everything.

As a teenager, the future restaurateur, cookbook author and TV personality went to live with a family in the European country.

What altered her path wasn’t the history or the people there — but the french fries served with mayonnaise.

She had street food for probably the first time, she said recently from her home in Los Angeles.

Along with a later visit to India, the Netherlands trip exposed her to a universe of foods and flavors beyond anything she knew in her native Toledo.

Feniger is best-known for making Latin American fare, but she is focused these days on cooking the offerings sold at stands and kiosks worldwide.

One of her restaurants, Susan Feniger’s Street, has dished up street food to crowds of customers in Los Angeles since 2009.

Her latest cookbook — Susan Feniger’s Street Food, released during the summer — features recipes for some of the most popular dishes she serves at Street: artichokes with lemon za’atar dipping sauce, Turkish doughnuts with rose-hip jam, Thai drunken shrimp with rice noodles, Korean glazed short ribs with sesame and Asian pear.

Feniger has come a long way from her youth in the Old Orchard neighborhood of Toledo and in Ottawa Hills — when she ate fried bologna sandwiches at Andre’s Lounge.

Yet her culinary roots still stem from northwestern Ohio.

“My mom was a fantastic cook,” the 59-year-old said, “so I have tons of great food memories from my mom. They threw great parties all the time.”

She remembers making fudge with her mother — also noted for her delicious fried chicken — and putting it in the freezer.

From a primarily Russian Jewish family, she has fond memories, too, of her Aunt Faye’s eggs scrambled with chicken livers and her Grandma Morgan’s potato pirogi.

Her career as an award-winning chef began when she worked as a teenager in the kitchen of Smith’s Cafeteria in Toledo.

But she didn’t think about a career in food preparation, she said, until she had dropped out of one college, Goddard in Vermont, and moved to another, Pitzer in California.

Employed in the school cafeteria while studying psychology, she was approached by the chef — who suggested she consider cooking as a living. She took an independent study program at the Culinary Institute of America and never rethought her goal.

Then, at the famous Le Perroquet restaurant in Chicago, Feniger met Mary Sue Milliken — her business partner for the past 30 years.

As the first two women to work in the kitchen there, they kept in touch and apprenticed separately in France. They met in Paris and talked about a restaurant.

The plan reached fruition in 1981, when they opened City Cafe in Los Angeles.

There, they met Julia Child — who later had them on one of her TV shows.

The moment proved pivotal because they were seen as telegenic and personable — qualities that the Food Network would later seek.

The duo shot almost 400 episodes of a couple of shows for the network.

During a trip to India, Feniger was inspired by the bold flavors, the combination of spices and the food available on the street.

Subsequent trips to other nations, especially in Asia and South America, continued to broaden her perspective.